Hosts w/o services

[Israel Brewster]

On Apr 16, 2008, at 10:10 AM, Ford, Andy wrote:
>
> <advice tag='unsolicited'>
> There must be some reason for each server or device to be on the
> network, it must provide some service, even if it's just a lowly(?)
> sshd.
> Do yourself and your organization a favor and monitor that reason!
> </advice>

To some extent, yes, but not necessarily a service we can monitor.  
There are quite a few devices on the network that it is important to  
us to know should the device fail, but aren't offering any separately  
monitorable "service", per se. For example, printers. We need to know  
if one dies, so we can fix it before it becomes a problem (not to  
mention that fixing the boss's printer before he even knows it has a  
problem makes you look good ;-) ), but other than the simple ping host  
check, they don't offer any "services" we can monitor.

Even some more essential devices such as switches can fall into this  
category, as they are just routing traffic, not offering any  
"services". I could, of course, go crazy and use check_snmp or  
something to monitor each port on said switch as a service, but that  
is way overkill for our needs- we just need to know that the switch is  
there and functioning, i.e. host check.

Not to mention the rather large category of client machines, which we  
need to know are running so they can be backed up, and, of course,  
used for whatever the user needs. Kind of difficult to monitor the  
ability to run office, or an e-mail client :-). We still want to  
monitor the host, though, so that hopefully if/when a client machine  
should die we can fix it before the user (who may well come in before  
us in the morning) is impacted. We could, of course, monitor something  
like ssh on those machines, but why? All we (and the user) care about  
is that the machine is functioning.

So yeah, while this may not be the way nagios is designed to work, and  
may never be (which I can live with if so), I really don't see this as  
being all that unusual a situation, as some responses seem to imply.

-----------------------------------------------
Israel Brewster
Computer Support Technician
Frontier Flying Service Inc.
5245 Airport Industrial Rd
Fairbanks, AK 99709
(907) 450-7250 x293
-----------------------------------------------
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: nagios-users-bounces at lists.sourceforge.net
>> [mailto:nagios-users-bounces at lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf
>> Of Israel Brewster
>> Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2008 1:01 PM
>> To: Nagios Users Mailinglist
>> Subject: [Nagios-users] Hosts w/o services
>>
>> Running nagios 3.0, I have set up a number (most) of my hosts
>> without
>> services, since all I am interested in monitoring is the hosts
>> themselves. However, this is causing a number of little annoyances,
>> such as the hosts not showing up when I type their name into the
>> nagios sidebar search, throwing numerous warnings if I do a verify
>> from the command line, giving me a blank page when I click the
>> hostname link from the hostgroup overview page, etc. Is there
>> any way
>> around these issues other than adding a check_dummy service check to
>> each host? Thanks.
>
>
>
>
> Wachovia Securities, LLC's outgoing and incoming e-mails are  
> electronically
> archived and subject to review and/or disclosure to someone other
> than the recipient.
>
> A.G. Edwards, a division of Wachovia Securities, LLC
>
>
>


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by the 2008 JavaOne(SM) Conference 
Don't miss this year's exciting event. There's still time to save $100. 
Use priority code J8TL2D2. 
http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;198757673;13503038;p?http://java.sun.com/javaone
_______________________________________________
Nagios-users mailing list
Nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users
::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when reporting any issue. 
::: Messages without supporting info will risk being sent to /dev/null